The traditional power system is configured and operated to meet power demands changes. Economic of scale due to industry development is driving more of power generation capacity, resulting increase and volatility in power demand. In response, methods,...
The traditional power system is configured and operated to meet power demands changes. Economic of scale due to industry development is driving more of power generation capacity, resulting increase and volatility in power demand. In response, methods, such as ED(Economic Dispatch) and UC(Unit Comment), have been developed to save generation costs, whilst satisfying such changes of demand. However, such unilateral system to such change of demand has its limitation and cannot guarantee the reliability and quality of the power system in the future.
Moreover, environment for energy generation and consumption is showing rapid changes recently. Increase and fluctuation of fossil fuels's cost, which is the main source for energy, is causing volatility in power generation cost. Especially, recent nuclear power safety issue, increased public interest to environmental issue and controls on greenhouse emissions restrain construction of additional new power plant, which makes it even harder to meet increasing power demand. In addition, increasing in the uncertainty of power generation due to increased size of renewable energy and mobile power demand such as EV(Electric Vehicle) is putting pressure on the stability of power system operation.
Power generation cost volatility, due to these changing environments, could be settled reasonably through the power exchange market. On the otherhand, most of countries have regulatory limitation on their electricity retail price, as power supply is treated national infrastructure business and has much impact on the national economy. And, this uniform pricing leads to excessive price distortion between generation cost and sales price. Sometimes, electric power suppliers have to supply, even when the retail price is cheaper than the market price, for the stable operation of power system. In such case, the laws of supply and demand cannot be applied in the electricity market. This increases financial risk on electric power suppliers and acts as an obstacle to efficient energy generation and consumption.
Accordingly, recent years, there has been increased voice to change this electricity consumption method. Many researches have been done to find a solution to overcome and renovate the electricity market price distortion. As part of that effort, Smart Grid has been proposed in cooperation with recent technical advancement of ICT(Information and Communication Technology). More in-depth study is in the progress, in this new field. The study focuses on DR(Demand Response) program, as it is considered to be an effective method for improving the price distortion problem.
DR program has two basic program, IBP(Incentive-based Demand Response Program) and PBP(Price-based Demand Response Program). DR program basically aim to shift electricity load from the price peak time to when its not. It opens to the public inelastic power demand and its market price, which then, can lead to reasonable power consumption and solves problem of price distortion in uniform pricing. In this manner, DR program can improve efficiency both of power supply and its demand.
The ultimate objective of DR program is to introduce time-varying tariff. Time-varying tariff is one of DR program that retail price reflect the volatility of electricity market price. Therefore, the consumer price is in the line with market price, so that the electricity consumer can adjust their consumption in reasonable manner, in consideration of its actual price.
As for the introduction of time-varying tariff, small scale energy consumer's acceptance act as a large barrier. It is hard for them to change their power consumption in response to market price, because of their adaptation to uniform pricing. Especially, it is realistic difficult for small scale consumer to monitor electricity price change every hour and reflect it to their consumption. Accordingly, new system and infrastructure needs to be developed to reflect these needs and changes.
This thesis will introduce new customer system and power sale infrastructure in order to introduce time-varying tariff. First, it will start by explaining the structure of new customer system to introduce time-varying tariff and smart appliance that automatically response to the price information. Then, the new method, which correspond with quantity pricing with this new customer system and smart appliances, will be explained. Realistic smart appliance examples have been introduced and these appliances’ simulation result responding to time-varying tariff also have been included in this paper. Finally, new power sales infrastructure has been proposed for the introduction of various tariff, and the method how each entities in proposed infrastructure interconnect with new customer system has been explained in this paper.